Successful UBports installation and contacts import on Nexus 5

I just successfully installed UBports onto a used Nexus 5 and imported my contacts via a vcf file from my old phone (Galaxy S2 running cyanogenmod). In case others are doing something like this, here is what I did.

I bought a used Nexus 5 (16 GB) from Cellular Exchange for $169. It is best to make sure the phone operates with its current ROM before buying it.

From the phone being turned off, I booted to the bootloader (also called fastboot mode) by holding down the Volume Up and Volume Down (press firmly on the center of the volume control bar on the left side of the phone) and then pressing and holding the power button until the bootloader screen appeared. Then I plugged the phone into the computer using its charging/usb cable.

The messages on the bootloader screen said the phone was locked, so from the Magic Device Tool Directory, I ran launcher.sh and selected the menu items to unlock the bootloader. This made a screen come up on the phone asking for confirmation to unlock it. I selected Yes. The phone then went back to the bootloader screen and showed its status as unlocked. The Magic Device Tool script exited with messages saying it completed successfully.

I decided to turn off the phone and reboot into the bootloader to make sure the unlocking stayed between boots. It did.

With the phone in bootloader mode and plugged into the computer, I ran launcher.sh again. This time I selected the menu items for Nexus 5 Ubuntu installation from the legacy channel (the only channel available right now). After selecting the last menu item (telling the script the phone was connected in fastboot/bootloader mode), I got the following in the terminal:

During this, phone rebooted to bootloader, then rebooted again and showed a ubports logo, then eventually moved from that to four animated circles. If you look in the terminal messages above, there was a problem pushing some files to the phone. The four animated dots were, unfortunately, the Android splash screen because the Android system had not been fully erased from the phone. I shut down the phone, let it sit for a few minutes, then rebooted it into the bootloader and ran the launcher.sh script again. I selected the menu items to install the legacy channel on a Nexus 5 again. The terminal messages were:

Note that the terminal messages this time showed the files being pushed without errors. While the terminal output was happening, the phone rebooted to bootloader once, then rebooted to UBports recovery, then rebooted to a ubports splash screen (white background, orange text, gray phone drawings). After 3 minutes the screen went dark, then a Google logo with an unlocked padlock icon appeared. About a minute after that a different UBports screen appeared with Ubuntu-like color scheme and a droid-like icon. Then it started prompting me for language and time zone and such to finish the setup.

After I finished the setup, I wanted to import my contacts from my old phone (Galaxy S2 running cyanogenmod). I had exported my contacts to a .vcf file and copied that to the Documents folder on the UBports Nexus 5. I went to the Contacts app on UBports importe the vcf file, but it didn't have any options to do that. On a lark, I decided to use the File Browser app and navigated to the Documents folder to make sure the vcf file was there. It was. When I selected it, I was shown a prompt asking what app to use to open the file. One of the options was the Contacts app, so I chose that. It made me very happen when that caused the Contacts App to import the vcf file. It took a minute or two for it to finish the import, but now all of my old contacts are on my new UBports phone.